Hello kqed,
Thanks for reaching out to us and providing such detailed instructions for recreating the issue. That is definitely helpful when trying to troubleshoot.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the same results. Meta appeared to be saving fine for me when saving a draft following the steps you’ve provided. Another thing that stands out as a little strange from your notes that I didn’t see replicated on my local environment was the multiple copies of a venue being created if you saved the draft multiple times. There should only be one instance of the venue created and showing under the “Venues” section of the dashboard no matter how many times the draft was saved before being published.
As an initial follow up, can you verify whether this issue persists after following the Testing for Conflicts procedures?
Let me know how that goes and we can continue to narrow in after that.
Thanks!